Share this story

Amazon's first-generation Kindle e-book reader was a frustrating device. The promise of an always-on connection to a vast e-book library and a decent book reading experience was ultimately diminished by design and interface decisions that were mystifying, and the whole package came with a set of additional features that performed so poorly that they detracted from any warm feelings generated by the central book-reading experience. In the time since Kindle's launch, Amazon has been as forthcoming about its plans for the reader as the NSA is about its monitoring capabilities, leaving lots of open questions about whether it even agreed with reviewers that there were problems with the device.

But actions speak louder than words, and now that the Kindle 2 is out, it's clear that Amazon was listening. We've had a chance to spend some time with Amazon's next-generation book reader, and nearly every aspect of the device is a big step up from the first version. There's little that's truly new about Kindle 2, but the result of the evolutionary changes is far more than the sum of its parts: Amazon has made a good device, and in the process, shown that it has what it takes to make an even better one.

A short history of Kindling

We've gone into extensive detail on the specific shortcomings of the first-generation Kindle, so reciting them isn't helpful; the important part is that these limitations torpedoed what might have been a great device. The Kindle promised a single, compact device that could hold a library of material, and more importantly, this library could be restocked with downloads from the Amazon store anywhere that a cellular connection is available. The same wireless capability would also deliver the morning paper and get the latest blog headlines, and the device could run for a week on a single charge. Kindle promised textual nirvana.

In reality, the result was an odd form of textual purgatory. The design, meant to evoke a book, looked positively clunky; it had a large keyboard that undercut its bookness and left users prone to randomly firing the controls simply when handling it. The interface didn't just seem to be designed by committee—it felt like different committees had handled the physical and visual UIs. The slow page flips and small screen undercut the book reading experience a bit, but the poor match between the page-centric reading model enforced by the Kindle, and scrolling-oriented content like blogs and newspapers, made venturing beyond books a poor experience. Anything beyond the reading—the web browser and MP3 player, primarily—suggested a device that promised much more than text, then underdelivered.

Two generations of Amazonian hardware.

Amazon greeted any criticisms of the device, and nearly any questions about it at all, with a wall of silence. The clearest symptom of this was a graph shown by Jeff Bezos during the introduction of the Kindle 2 in which he showed how the introduction of the Kindle caused e-book sales to take off. The axes of the graph were completely unlabelled—Amazon clearly doesn't want anyone to have a look under the hood. It has taken the same approach with hardware numbers: although the device is frequently sold-out, nobody outside of Amazon has a clue as to what that means.

So it wasn't clear that Amazon cared enough to even register the problems with the original Kindle, much less put in the design effort to fix them. The fact that the first-generation device attracted a dedicated fan base could very easily have convinced the company that it had captured the e-book audience it needed, and it could cruise indefinitely with that.

Amazon has clearly not set the cruise control.

The out-of-box experience

Amazon has obviously bought in to the argument that careful packaging helps build customer loyalty by convincing buyers that the company sweated all the small things that make for a great user experience. Last time around, the Kindle's elaborate packaging probably oversold it. Amazon has now gone for a bit more understatement, offering a very compact shipping container that's brown cardboard on the outside, but custom Kindle on the inside. The same basic theme of characters in various alphabets appears on some of the internal packaging, but it's a far more subtle matter of contrasting reflection on a surface with uniform color.

Amazon has managed to squeak presentation into a small shipping box.

The compact shipping container is enabled, in part, by the fact that Kindle 2 comes with less stuff. Aside from the device itself, there's only a thin, printed introduction and a combination charging/USB cable that can plug directly into a computer or into an included wall plug adaptor.

One of the annoying features of the first generation device was that it left you no clue as to whether the charging process was actually working—a yellow charge light would come on when plugged in, and then shut itself off after a set amount of time. Unplug and replug it, and it came back on. Amazon has now entered the modern electronic era: Kindle 2 sports a charge light that stays on as long as it's drawing power, and turns green when the battery's fully charged. It's just one of the countless ways that the company has shown that it gets it.

Because Amazon has control over the whole stack, they know precisely who's buying each Kindle, and so the device comes pre-configured to work with your existing Amazon account. All the easier to get shopping, which is clearly what Amazon is hoping its customers will do.